Friday, March 4, 2016

'WALK TO MORDOR' UPDATE: 548 miles down and 1,251 miles to go

I
continued my (virtual) “Walk to Mordor” during the past week by logging 13 more
miles since my last update. I walked/jogged five miles on Sunday, three more
miles on Wednesday and five miles today (Friday). So far, I’ve logged 548 total
miles on this virtual trip to Mount Doom, and I’ve got 1,251 more miles to go
before I reach Mordor. All in all, I’ve completed about 30.5 percent of the
total trip.

In
relation to Frodo’s journey, I’m on the sixth night of the trip past Rivendell,
which is the night of Dec. 30-1 Yule on the Middle Earth calendar. I left off
my last update on Mile 535, which was five miles from where the Fellowship
camps in a thicket of thorn bushes during the daylight hours of Dec. 30.

I
reached that point, Mile 540, on Sunday. Four miles later and four miles into
Night 6, at Mile 544, the group reached a crest of another low mountain spur
and began to turn southwest as they descend. Four miles later, at Mile 548, the
path comes to a steep drop-off, and the group goes along the cliff-top for a
while. The next significant milestone, Mile 555, comes seven miles later when
the group camps during the day of 1 Yule.

So
far, I’m on track to travel the 462 miles from Rivendell to Lothlorien, which
is the forest realm of the Elves, between Rivendell and Mordor, within the 2016
calendar year. To pull this off in a year’s time, I’ve got to travel at least
8.9 miles per week, that is, a little more than a mile a day. So far, so good, since
I covered a total of 13 miles this week and 90 miles since the start of the calendar
year.

For
those of you reading this for the first time, I began this “Walk to Mordor”
fitness challenge on Jan. 1, 2015. Using a book called “The Atlas of
Middle-Earth” by Karen Wynn Fonstad, fans of “The Lord of the Rings” created
this challenge by mapping out Frodo’s fictional trek to Mordor, calculating the
total distance at 1,799 miles. They also used the original "Lord of the
Rings" text to outline the journey, so you can follow their route by
keeping up with your total mileage.

The
folks who worked out the nuts and bolts of this virtual journey have divided it
into four parts. It’s 458 miles from Hobbiton to Rivendell, 462 miles from
Rivendell through Moria to Lothlorien, 389 miles from Lothlorien down the
Anduin to Rauros Falls and 470 miles from Rauros to Mount Doom. (Those
locations should sound very familiar to “Lord of the Rings” fans.) The hobbits
averaged 18 miles a day, but if you walk (or jog, as I sometimes do) five miles
a day, it’s possible to cover 1,799 miles in a year.